Nostr report
What’s happening in the Nostr ecosystem (while playing with R programming)
Date: December 31, 2024
Introduction
What’s Nostr? Acronym for “Notes and Other Stuff Transmitted by Relays”, it’s a relatively new, simple and open protocol that enables global, decentralized, and censorship-resistant communication.
Structured around event objects (plain JSON) and using standard elliptic-curve cryptography for keys and signing (verifiability), it doesn’t rely on a small number of trusted servers for moving or storing data; it assumes that relays (servers) will disappear and allows users to connect and publish to an arbitrary number of relays that they can change over time (resilience).
Alongside this, we have specific clients or apps that validate signatures, while fetching and publishing data from relays of their choice (or the user’s choice). Different client design and purpose (based on what kind of events receive and transmit) makes Nostr a scenario where multiple use cases can be tested, not only for social media but also for identity verification, data storage and sharing, writing wikis or blogs, streaming applications, etc.
Tables
The first big use case for Nostr has been the development of Twitter-like clients, such as Amethyst or Primal. We can take a glimpse of what notes and users are trending in the following tables:
⚠️ Data might be outdated until curl package is available for WebR
Resources
Protocol:
- https://fiatjaf.com/nostr.html/
- https://github.com/nostr-protocol/
- https://nostr.com/
Data:
- https://nostr.band/
- https://nostr.watch/
- https://nostr.info/